Hi guys, recentlly i had a flip of death crash, most likelly caused by the molex cable coming loose because of vibration, didnt have it hot glued. the kopter landed on its head and the PDB got a pretty big hit, i started trubleshooting the BL's and only one needed replacement, after i replaced that one then something else came up and things kept coming up, until i replaced the PDB because the one from tha crash, after an xray i took of it, i found a fracture then more problems started to come up i am at a point that after 2 weeks i thought i had it all figured out, today, motor 5 wont turn correctlly, i mean it will go and stop go and stop after 50% throttle, and 8 is dead. so to sum things up, i found that even if a bl looks fine on the outside, it may not be in the inside, one of the bl's i had to replace because after tow day troubleshooting, truns out the atmega was ruined because of the hit on the crash. so i started thinking, a normal esc goes on the boom, so a flip of death crash wont kill all of them, which is not the case with mk bls, because they are all in the same PDB and if the PDB gets banged, most of them if not all of them will suffer. theres no IC2!!! error with a regular esc. an esc setup does look kind of messy compared to the MK PDB, also the power distribuiton block needed to use regular esc on a multirotor doesnt insipre much confidence. an esc can be changed in a matter of minutes, compared to the mk bl's where you take a while desoldering and soldering the new one. the one thing that troubles me about using esc with mk stack is the converter needed, there really few documentation regarding the use of the converter on mk okto. eventhough i think my mk PDB is 90% fixed, i dont trust it, not after the many times i thought it was fine and a few minutes after, all of a sudden another bl starts acting up, and my conclusion is that eventhough i dont plan to crash again anytime soon, it can happen again and if it does i am going to have to change the whole PDB board or else i wont trust it.
Im sure you may have seen this thread but Josh is using the converter... http://forum.freeflysystems.com/index.php?threads/converting-to-heavy-lift-cs8-build-thread.390/
If you are looking to go to different ESCs rather then the MK you can use the converter... it has it's little quarks and it does take a decent amount of tuning but it's pretty good once it's all setup. I will continue to use mine until FF releases their new FC. josh